via Gautam Bhan on FB The words "has been suspended" are gnawing at me again. A top cop, a middle cop, a bottom cop, an ordinary cop -- they slap, they abuse, they violate, they refuse their duty. Why is suspension an appropriate and the only response? Remove the word cop from the news headline today and a man slapped a woman in public. Bas. It's called assault. The response is not suspension but a criminal complaint. Unless cops realise the law applies to them as well, we can't move forward. Assault. Under the new laws, non-registering an FIR comes with six months imprisonment. These are crimes - they merit justice, not suspensions.

Via Shuddhabratta Sengupta at Kafila"We have to ask where these 2000 Rupees come from. In all likelihood they represent a fraction of the floating fruits of extortion that are available in any police station on Delhi. And just as the extortion nexus between police and private transporters was one of the factors that enabled the rape and murder in the white bus in December 2012,so too does the peculiar detail of the police extortion economy feature as the key ingredient in the clumsy effort to ‘cover up’ this latest incident. Policemen can do this and create the objective conditions for a culture of rape on Delhi because they are confident of being able to get away with it.

Let the men in uniform know that their badges and insignia are the marks of shame."